Gwendolyn Brooks, the great poet of Bronzeville, would have turned 100 years old on June 7. Although she won many honors and accolades before her death in 2000—she was the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1950 for Annie Allen, her second collection of poems; she served as a poetry consultant to the Library of Congress and, for 32 years, as Illinois’s poet laureate; and her work has been widely anthologized—her former student, poet Quraysh Ali Lansana, believes she deserves nothing more than a full year of celebration, throughout Chicago and the entire country. He calls it Our Miss Brooks 100.
Brooks has been underrated, says John Wilkinson, a poet and U. of C. professor who was one of the organizers of Centennial Brooks, not just because she was a black woman, but also because of her decision in the late 1960s to not have her work published by big New York publishers but by small, independent, black-run presses in Chicago. “She’s read and explored in a different way from poets who have major New York publishers behind them,” Wilkinson says. “We wanted to show that Gwendolyn Brooks’s influence is extremely widespread and extends outside of poetry.”
Thu 4/6-Sun 4/8 Various times and locations 773-702-2787gwendolynbrooks100.org Free
